Arts and Letters

Hill.

Introduction:

Members of the Clan and Fellow Travelers

ANY COLLECTION OF ESSAYS reflects the assignments one has received from various newspapers and journals as much as it reveals abiding preoccupations. I’ve been lucky in the last two decades that I’ve been free to pick and choose among the book reviews and profiles that have been proposed to me. Certainly no artist or writer discussed in this book has failed to engage my sympathies, and a handful (Nabokov, Merrill, Proust, Isherwood, Genet) have been icons throughout my creative life.

A novelist inevitably has a strategic relationship to anyone he writes an essay about. I am drawn to a writer or photographer or painter because he or she actually was or is a friend and belonged to the same clan (Dowell, Rorem, Foucault, Chatwin, Brainard, Isherwood, Mapplethorpe) or because they count as inspiring antecedents (Proust, Nabokov, Gide, Genet, George Eliot). I’ve always been intrigued by unjustly forgotten writers (Bunin, Hamsun, Robbe-Grillet) and have written to bring their names back before the public, if only for an instant.

There are three general essays in this book: one on the historical novel (a subject that interested me when I was writing my own first historical novel, Fanny: A Fiction), another an autobiographical overview of my career as a gay novelist and biographer, and finally a piece on bisexuality prompted by a reading of Marjorie Garber’s influential Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.

Of course most of the essays in this book are about gay men, since I’ve often been asked to comment on their work—and I’ve just as naturally felt unusually moved by men like me and their creative achievement. Not all the people in this book are on easy terms with their sexuality and as a consequence I’ve not always dwelled on it. Others, such as Deneuve, Nabokov, Bunin, Hamsun, Paley, Rebecca Horn and Duchamp, are or were famously straight. Nobody’s perfect.

I have rewritten these essays to a greater or lesser extent in preparing them for this collection. Sometimes I’ve taken bits from three different pieces on Paul Bowles and fashioned a new essay; at other junctures I’ve not so much updated a portrait as removed from it distractingly dated references. Since I’ve devoted a long biography to Genet and a short one to Proust, I make no apology for the slightness of these essays about them. Yves Saint Laurent, David Geffen, Catherine Deneuve, and Elton John I’ve listed as Personalities since they are colorful and significant cultural icons or forces but they can’t be snuck into the rubrics Letters or Arts.

I would like to thank Patricia Willis at the Beinecke Library of Yale University for unearthing some of these articles and essays from my archives there. Frédérique Delacoste and Felice Newman have helped immensely to see these pages into print at Cleis Press. I want to thank Donald Weise for conceiving of this collection in the first place.

—Edmund White

LETTERS

Writing Gay

SOME FORTY YEARS AGO I won a college literary award for a play I’d written that was called The Blueboy in Black. The prize money I spent buying cases of a terrible sweet fizzy Italian wine named Asti Spumante, which I considered wildly elegant. Though the award money was quickly dissipated, my name and the name of my play were announced in the New York Times, which led to an agent contacting me. Through her a production was arranged and two years later my play, starring the black actors Cicely Tyson and Billy Dee Williams, opened off-Broadway. The play, partly because at the time I was out-of-touch with the newest trends, was a bit démodé, a recycling of the Theatre of the Absurd and Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and I was criticized for being dated. Worse, in 1964 we were at the height of the Civil Rights Movement when the race problem was supposed to have been solved, but I was showing angry blacks on stage who were taking revenge on their white employers. The critic for the Times, Bosley Crowther, said, Negroes in America have enough problems without Mr. White. The most positive review, by Alan Pryce-Jones in Theatre Arts, called it one of the two best plays of the year. But when I met Mr. Pryce-Jones twenty years later (and this is the Proustian part) and thanked him for his kindness, he had no recollection of my play.

The play was not only about race but also about homosexuality. When my ultraconservative Republican father came to the opening night with a business associate he asked me privately, What’s it about—the usual?, which was his way of referring to a gay theme. I had to confess that it was a little bit about the usual. Of course for him discussion of race was almost as offensive, so it must have made for a rather uncomfortable evening.

When I was a junior at the University of Michigan I had won a somewhat smaller award for a collection of short stories, and there again the usual had been a recurring theme at a time when almost no gay literature existed—and when even the very term was unknown. To be sure, Baldwin had recently published a despairing homosexual-themed novel, his beautiful book Giovanni’s Room, and Gore Vidal and Paul Bowles and Tennessee Williams were all experimenting with short gay fiction, much of it extremely deft and sophisticated, but none of them became celebrated or successful for their gay fiction. They all had to go on to quite different work in order to achieve their immense fame.

I suppose I never had much of a choice. For some reason I had a burning need to explore my own gay identity in fiction. I’d written my first gay novel when I was just fifteen and a boarding student at Cranbrook boys school in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit. Since I didn’t play sports I had the long afternoons in which to do my homework and then the official two-hour enforced study hall in the evenings to work on my novel, which I called The Tower Window. It was all about a boy much like myself who turns to an adult man, a handsome Mexican, because he’s been rejected by a girl his own age. I had a highly developed fantasy that I would sell this novel and make a fortune, which would allow me to escape my dependence on my parents—but even though my mother’s secretary typed it up for me I never got around to sending it off. Perhaps I didn’t know where to send it.

No matter what I wrote, even at the very beginning, it was bound to have homosexual subject matter. I studied fiction in a creative writing class at the University of Michigan in a workshop conducted by Allan Seager. The one time I had a conference with him he thoroughly frightened me by saying, The nouns in a paragraph should be arranged like the heads in a painting by Uccello. Utrillo? I asked. Aw, get out of here, he said, fed up and waving me out.

In those years, long before gay liberation, no one could write a proud, self-respecting, self-affirming gay text, since no gay man, no matter how clever, had found a way to like himself—not even Proust, the sovereign intellect of fiction, had managed that one. But a homosexual writer could be impertinent, elusive, camp—and that was a tone I adopted in a novel I submitted to the Hopwood Committee in my senior year, a book called The Amorous History of Our Youth, which was quite an arch performance, starting with its title, an allusion to two books—Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Times and a scandalous character attack of the seventeenth century called The Amorous History of the Gauls by Bussy-Rabutin, Mme de Sévigné’s cousin. Louis XIV exiled him for his book. I remember that the Hopwood judge, a woman novelist, was quite rightly so irritated by the flipness of this novel—an account of a sexual love between two brothers, one rich and one poor, separated at birth—that she couldn’t contain her rage and gave it a severe drubbing (I rather fear I wasn’t meant to see this evaluation and pulled strings in order to read it). Of course she was right— the novel must have been appallingly grating. But I suspect that in that period, when no homosexual could defend his identity as anything other than an illness, a sin or a crime, our inexpressible anger came out in bizarre forms—as a hostile and inappropriate superciliousness, for instance.

And though I was a fairly bright student I had almost no skill as a writer. I wrote in a trance, almost unconsciously, because I was writing to stay sane, to conduct my own autoanalysis, to drain off my daily dose of anguish, remorse and hostility. That was the era of the bitchy queen, since there were no available modes of open anger, of self-legitimizing affirmation. I wrote as drag queens bitched at each other on the street corner—to claim attention, to shock, even to horrify the straight people passing by. Later, after gay liberation, we were able as people and as writers to redefine ourselves as members of a minority group who could mount campaigns for our rights and against societal stereotyping, but back then, forty years ago, such a program would have caused us to puff on our cigarettes and to say, "Get you, Mary."

This terrible unconsciousness and obsessiveness continued to mark my writing after graduation. I’d found a job in the very bastion of American conservatism, the halls of Time and Life. I worked in New York for Time-Life Books, writing essays about everything from the giant molecule to the Japanese garden, but every night I grimly returned to my office after a solitary supper and wrote many, many bad plays, which my agent refused even to send out—and a long novel. The novel rather confusingly bore a title, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, which I used years later for an entirely different book. This book was confessional, despairing, and all about a hopeless, one-sided love affair with a handsome, brilliant guy my age who became temporarily insane, so guilty was he about being a homosexual at all. This book, which I finished in 1966, three years before the advent of gay liberation, was sent out to some twenty publishing houses, all of which rejected it. Two of the editors who read it were clandestinely gay and were afraid to accept it lest they be labeled as gay themselves and fired—or so they told me years later.

After this defeat I thought I should write a good book—it sounds ludicrous, but it only then occurred to me that I could and should write a book that was obviously impressive. For if I’d never bothered to write well myself, I was a connoisseur of good writing done by others. I loved Firbank and Proust and Colette and Jean Genet and at this time specially Nabokov. I could suddenly imagine what it would be like to bring to the page the same pleasure I took in reading the fiction of these geniuses. Not that I hoped to emulate their art; I just wanted to exercise in my own writing the taste that made me respond to theirs.

The Usual was still part of my new novel, Forgetting Elena, except now it was as obscure as the rest of the book. The narrator is an amnesiac who doesn’t want to admit he’s lost his memory and who struggles to second-guess from other people’s reactions what sort of person he must be. He has no idea what sex and love are, and the heterosexual love scene, which must be one of the most peculiar in literature, he construes as something like a dangerous and ultimately painful religious rite. A man named Herbert displays all the signs (at least to our eyes) of being in love with the narrator. The whole thing takes place in an island kingdom (which may or may not be real—or perhaps just a distorted vision of Fire Island), an ambiguity which in some ways recalls the real or unreal kingdom in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Forgetting Elena, my first book to be published, was not perceived as a gay-themed book at all; three years after it had come out to no acclaim whatsoever, Nabokov singled it out as one of his favorite American novels. By then, of course, most of the first edition had been pulped.

I don’t want to recapitulate my writing career, such as it has been; I’d rather focus on two or three aspects of gay writing that have interested me in recent years. Most importantly, I’d like to talk about the writing of biographies of gay men and how that has affected some of my own fiction.

In 1982 I published what has possibly become my best-known book, A Boy’s Own Story. At the time the craze for memoirs had not yet taken off. Of course generals who’d won the battle of Iwo Jima might write their memoirs, but the interest in their historical accomplishment was firmly established in advance. Back then few nobodies wrote their memoirs, and I was quite happy to call my piece of autofiction a novel. First of all calling something a novel, at least back then, protected a writer from pesky personal questions of the sort, Why did you betray your high school teacher when he was so nice to you?

Second, by calling my book a novel I could take all sorts of liberties with the truth without being held accountable for the discrepancies. I could change around the chronology to make it more dramatic. I could reduce the cast of characters, so messy and redundant in real life. And, in my particular case, I could nudge my own weird case towards the norm, at least the gay norm, and hope to pick up a bit more reader identification along the way. Whereas in real life I had been bizarrely brazen (or perhaps driven) sexually, and just as unpleasantly precocious intellectually, in the fictional derivation from my life I could make my stand-in shy and not outstanding in any way. In short, I could make him much more likable.

In the summer of 1983 I moved to Paris, where I stayed for the next sixteen years except for a few short intervals. When I finally moved back to the States four years ago I was surprised by many things: the institutionalization of identity politics, which had still been struggling to impose itself when I’d left; the concurrent ascendance of a rather Stalinist brand of political correctness; and finally the parallel growth of Oprah-style programs and the memoir industry. I suppose all three phenomena—identity politics, political correctness and the memoir (usually linked to a disability or an oppressed minority or a childhood trauma)—could all be labeled aspects of the culture of complaint, though I see them more as parts of a very American tradition of bearing witness and of commandeering that testimony into a political program: the personal as political, which may be America’s most salient contribution to the armamentarium of progressive politics.

I followed up A Boy’s Own Story with two other books in a trilogy— The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1987) and The Farewell Symphony, ten years later, in 1997. Already, with The Beautiful Room Is Empty, I had discovered that whereas there is something eternal about childhood, that the strong nameless moods of that first period of life are undated, there is something highly historical about early adulthood. The sheltered if miserable childhood I had in Cincinnati and Texas as a boy could just as easily have been led in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. My childhood, at least, was all yearning and brooding, running through woods and fields, and much of it was spent in isolation or with maids who resented all of us. As a result I never indicated when or where the action was taking place in A Boy’s Own Story. Even the narrator’s all-male boarding school has a distinctly nineteenth-century feel to it. The one thing that was undeniably American about the book, as I learned later from talking with European readers, was how free and unsupervised the boy was. But that sort of freedom was something Europeans had noticed about American children already in the nineteenth century

By the time I got to describing my protagonist’s early adulthood in The Beautiful Room Is Empty I knew it was crucial that I show exactly when and where he came of age. Coming out in New York in the 1960s was obviously something very different from what coming out in London in 2000, say, would be. Moreover, I decided to have my narrator-protagonist enter directly into a major historical turning point—the beginning of gay liberation. That breakthrough occurred in June 1969 at the Stonewall Uprising, the first time gays resisted arrest en masse and rose up against the cops after the raid of a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. As it happened, I had witnessed this event firsthand and it had had a direct impact on me.

In fact in planning the book I started with the violence that would come at the end, with Stonewall, and decided to construct a book leading up to it that would prompt even the most conservative heterosexual reader to become impatient with the hero’s self-hatred and his years spent in therapy seeking in vain to go straight. I wanted that reader to say out loud, Oh, for crissake, get on with your life and leave us all in peace. I was pleased when the daily New York Times critic wrote something almost exactly like that.

In the ten years that intervened between the publication of this second book and that of the third I had devoted seven years to researching and writing my biography of Jean Genet.

I would like to tell you a little bit about that experience and then eventually lead the discussion back to how my Genet affected the shape of The Farewell Symphony.

Genet died in 1986 and a year later my editor, Bill Whitehead, asked me if I knew anyone interested in writing his biography. Without much reflection I said, Me! I thought the project would take no more than three years of researching and writing. But at the end of three years I’d written not one word and knew almost nothing about my subject. I lied to my new editor (Bill in the meanwhile had died of AIDS) and said it was coming along swimmingly, but in fact I was in a complete panic and considered stepping in front of an oncoming bus just to get out of my contract. I didn’t dare admit I didn’t even know the name of the village where Genet had been born (no one did). Although I’m considered brash, I could be defeated by the slightest refusal from a stranger, and in the world Genet had left behind everyone was very strange indeed.

Genet was completely unlike most subjects of literary biography, who are middle-class prodigies, adored by their mothers; the mothers save every scrap of their juvenilia and as the little darlings grow up they are surrounded by friends who are also writers or at least highly literate. These other people all keep journals, send letters, now even print up the e-mails they receive from distinguished friends, publish accounts of their own lives and create fictional portraits of one another. The parents and mates of the middle-class writer save every scrap they write and their movements are widely reported in the press.

Writing a biography of someone such as Sartre, for instance, is primarily a question of what to exclude in an overly documented life.

Genet, by contrast, was an orphan, raised in a village—but which one?—and had already entered the French penal system by the time he was an adolescent. He had no literary friends until he was in his early thirties and was briefly taken up by the gay men around Cocteau as well as by Cocteau himself. Even that Parisian literary interlude lasted less then ten years. Throughout most of his life Genet’s friends were criminals, fellow soldiers, fellow prisoners, shady boyfriends, thieves for whom he worked as a fence, Black Panthers, Palestinian soldiers—in other words, people hard to identify and locate, people who die young, people who are suspicious of a white American interviewer, people who in any event scarcely know what a biography is. Criminals in particular are people who die young, who can’t be found (if they’re still alive), who if they’re found won’t talk, who if they talk are not to be believed and who in any event want to be paid. I knew perfectly well that Genet would have disliked me, since he detested whites, members of the middle-class, Americans, writers and avowed homosexuals—on five counts I was out. Why should his friends and survivors like me any more? Moreover, Genet detested the idea of anyone ever writing his biography, partly because a real life would challenge and even overthrow his own account of things in his so-called autobiographical novels such as A Thief’s Journal.

In addition, Genet had eventually rejected and abandoned all his friends, so each time I met one of them I was dealing with a wounded person, someone who remembered Genet only as a painful episode in his or her life, yet sometimes as the most important one.

After three years of fruitless research I was so obsessed with Genet that I’d virtually forgotten I’d ever written novels of my own. Once in England when I was giving a talk about Genet someone asked me about my own fiction and I blinked, uncomprehending for a moment.

In my ignorance and arrogance I had initially hired a beautiful American boy and girl to help me with my research, though they had no special skills as scholars and had never read Genet’s oeuvre (nor did they get around to it now). They had no idea of where to start, no more than I did. Unwittingly we had stumbled onto the most challenging and intransigent of all modern literary biographical subjects. Nevertheless, each of these two beauties provided me with one vital link in the story. The young woman I hired to pretend to take French lessons from Paule Thevenin, someone who had refused to grant me an interview. Paule was an extremely difficult older woman who had befriended Genet in the 1960s and helped him prepare the final version of his great play The Screens. Although my young American spoke excellent French she engaged Paule for a year as her coach (all at my expense); at last she’d become sufficiently close to her to be able to ask her to give me an interview, which was finally granted. After an initial coldness Mme Thevenin opened up and shared freely with me hundreds of specific and enlightening memories—and even showed me X-rays of Genet’s kidneys! (Her husband had been Genet’s doctor and had provided him with the powerful sleeping pills he’d consumed by the handful.)

The young handsome American man also had a find. A friend of his sent him a clipping from Le Morvandiau, a newspaper published in Paris for people who’d moved to the capital from the rather primitive district known as the Morvan. In this paper was an article by a certain M. Bruley about my classmate, Jean Genet. The article itself was a whitewash of Genet’s highly questionable character but it did give us the name of the village (Alligny) and M. Bruley eventually led us to a dozen other villagers who’d grown up with Genet and considered him to have been a highly dubious character.

As the years went by I teamed up with the world’s leading Genet expert, Albert Dichy, who prepared me a complete chronology of Genet’s life and who established Genet’s elaborate police record in every town and village in France. He also introduced me to key people in Genet’s life including his three heirs (a seven-year-old Moroccan boy, a circus horse trainer and an ex–race car driver). Through Albert I met Genet’s literary lawyer and several criminal lawyers who’d worked with his legal dossier as well as Leila Shahid, the Palestinian ambassador to Paris. I interviewed a woman who pointed a pistol at the lion when her husband put his head in the animal’s mouth during their circus act.

Genet was as assiduous a traveler as I myself am, so I took some pleasure in following him to Damascus and to Morocco, where I visited his grave, which looks out on the local prison, a bordello and the sea— three of the great tropes of his fiction. I interviewed Jane Fonda, the mother of one of my former students, Vanessa Vadim. She had met Genet at a benefit for the Panthers in the early 1970s in Hollywood. Genet had grabbed onto her because she was one of the few people present who could speak French at the party (for years she’d lived in France when she’d been married to the French film director Roger Vadim). Genet took her phone number and called her the next morning at six. He’d awakened in a strange house, he didn’t know where he was and he wanted his coffee. Miss Fonda said, Okay, I’ll come right away but where are you? Genet didn’t know. At last she, who’d grown up in Hollywood and knew every house, said, Go outside and come back and describe the pool to me. He did so and she said, Oh, you’re at Donald Sutherland’s. I’ll be right over.

One of the valuable keys to Genet’s American period that Albert Dichy tracked down was the testimony of a Swiss woman named Marianne de Pury. Albert had seen that Genet had written her several letters, which she had sold or given to the library at Kent State University. We tracked her down just as she was moving back to Switzerland from Santa Fe, New Mexico, after some twenty-five years in the States. She had been a pretty upper-class Swiss girl with blonde hair and a pearl necklace who’d moved to the States and almost immediately become involved with the Panthers and in particular their minister of information known as Big Man. It was she who had translated for Genet almost everywhere he went in the States—and fortunately she had a good memory.

I read the interviews that Genet had given to Japanese papers and Arab papers and Spanish theatrical magazines and Austrian and Italian magazines— none of them previously collected. I got my hands on some rather stiff and literary love letters Genet had written in his late twenties to Lily Pringsheim, a German leftist living in Czechoslovakia in the mid-1930s, a woman who had harbored him when he was fleeing the authorities after he’d deserted from the army. I interviewed the English journalist who’d interviewed Genet on television—a memorable occasion during which Genet, insisting that every person in the room had as much to say as he did, or more, turned the cameras on the technicians and interrogated them. I went to a garage outside Cannes where one of Genet’s lovers now worked in what he called the Garage Saint Genet. His wife spoke freely and interestingly to me, but her husband gunned the motors he was repairing louder and louder to drown out our voices. I interviewed a ghastly racist millionaire who had been one of Genet’s first patrons and who spoke insultingly of blacks while his black servants waited on us. I interviewed Sartre’s male secretary from the years during which Sartre had known Genet and written his huge tome, his literary psychoanalysis, Saint Genet. In the end I spent every penny I earned, and then some, on my research and my travels, but my book did win the National Book Critics Circle Award—and the citation singled out my research as what most impressed the judges.

When at last, after the seven years consecrated to Genet, I came back to my own fiction I found that I had been influenced not so much by Genet (whose work I intensely admire but have never attempted to emulate) as by the experience of writing a biography. And not just any biography but a gay biography which, depending on the subject, is marginally different from a biography of a heterosexual. Of course all lives are different, and nationality or profession or period are factors at least as determining as sexual orientation. But I would like to suggest that there are special problems and considerations touching on gay biography. In Genet’s case he usually fell for younger heterosexual men with connections to the underworld. Genet several times in his life built houses for these lovers and reserved a room in each house for himself. He invariably befriended their wives and in disputes usually took their side. Because I’m gay myself and just thirty years younger than Genet, I flatter myself that I knew how to interpret these relationships. From my experience of the world I knew that such relationships between older gay patrons, if you will, and younger heterosexual studs were quite common in the old Mediterranean world and I knew enough not to make too much of them or too little.

Biographers, to be sure, are no better or worse than their fellow citizens and in treating the lives of lesbians and gay men biographers have been guilty of whitewashing or rewriting or even suppressing their subjects’ sexual and romantic lives.

Perhaps the prejudices against homosexuals can be said to begin with ignoring many gay writers or relegating them to playing minor roles in the lives of supposedly more important heterosexuals. A figure like Oscar Wilde was always too influential to ignore—too scandalous, too quotable— though at first he was turned into a tragic fop, a witty, epigrammatic Pagliacci, and few biographers were prepared to take him as seriously as everyone took even such an incompetent heterosexual as Nietzsche, for instance, though the parallels are striking (a love of paradox, argumentation through apothegms, hatred of the bourgeoisie, little concern about self-contradiction, an exhortation of readers towards the transvaluation of all values). Only Richard Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde redressed this balance; moreover, it took another gay man, Neil Bartlett in Who Was That Man?, to speculate about the exact nature of Wilde’s sexuality. Of course the question is far from being settled and Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, whom I’ve met, is campaigning for Wilde-as-bisexual.

Just as homosexuals themselves were (and often still are) shrugged off as minor retainers at life’s banquet, uninitiated in the mysteries of childbirth, adultery and divorce, in the same way an elusive but major gay novelist such as the late Edwardian Ronald Firbank has been largely ignored by biographers, despite the fact that writers as different from one another as Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh all claimed they’d been influenced by him, Hemingway by the practice of representing a crowd scene through unassigned bits of dialogue and Waugh through the exquisite timing of his humor. Brigid Brophy did write a massive biography of Firbank, Prancing Novelist, but it is so subjective, capricious and unreliable as to be anything but a standard life. Brophy refused to conduct any original research of her own. She relied on the only other biographer, Miriam Benkowitz, an American librarian, who approached Firbank primarily as a bibliographical problem. Never was a biographer more ill-suited to her subject. Only now is an English gay man, Richard Canning, at last writing Firbank’s life, reopening long-closed archives, revisiting all the places Firbank knew, including Rome and North Africa, and studying the effect of Jamaican Creole in Firbank’s novel Sorrow in Sunlight. Canning has also uncovered the comedy of errors that surrounded the author’s burial and reburial in Rome. Such painstaking scholarship is lavished on a writer only when the biographer is convinced of his first-rank value.

In the past sometimes all trace of homosexuality in a statesman or military officer, say, would simply be erased. Cambacarès, for instance, was Napoleon’s prime minister and so openly gay that he convinced the emperor to decriminalize homosexuality. Thanks to Cambacarès France had no laws against homosexuals until the pro-Nazi Vichy government came to power during World War II. But when I picked up a French biography of Cambacarès written in the 1950s, there was no mention of his sexuality nor of his influence on France’s laws. A misplaced prudishness, in other words, had led the biographer to ignore altogether the legislation for which his subject is most likely to be remembered.

When I was working on my life of Genet the French publisher was worried that I would turn him into a gay writer. (I had made the mistake in an interview in the French press of calling Rimbaud a homosexual poet.) The French are strenuously opposed to all minority designations of writers, past or present; it’s part of the legacy of their universalism dating back to the Enlightenment and the Revolution and it is one of the main cultural differences with the values of the United States, the home of identity politics. Gallimard, the French publisher, was relieved when my Genet manuscript came in and seemed devoid of any special pleading for Genet as a gay hero.

When I wrote my Penguin life of Proust I decided to discuss his homosexuality— how else could I make my book different from the hundreds that had preceded it?—but I was attacked for this approach in the New York Times Book Review and in the New York Review. The Times critic, the English novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd, took me to task for reducing Proust to his sexuality. Similarly, Roger Shattuck in the New York Review struck a blow for Proust’s universality against my supposedly narrowing view. And the Egyptian memoirist André Aciman announced that Proust had been a masturbator and not homosexual at all.

I think anyone who has read my book will attest to at least the density and inclusiveness of my brief biography and to my discussion of everything from Proust’s crippling asthma to his youthful social-climbing, from his liberating translations of Ruskin into French to his various and prolonged struggles to become a writer, from his dark vision of love and friendship to his strenuous efforts to court prize committees, but I refuse to apologize for my treatment of his sexuality, especially since it presented him with complex literary problems.

Proust himself recognized that homosexuality was a key theme—and a thoroughly original one—in his book and worried that his friend Lucien Daudet had beat him to the punch in his early novel. Only when Proust had examined Daudet’s book was he reassured that it was a trivial and inexplicit treatment of the theme and no threat to his own primacy in the field. Proust had promised his publisher, Gallimard, early on that his book might be judged obscene since it treated a pedophile. Indeed many of the female characters turn out to be lesbians and nearly all of the male characters are queer—except Marcel, the narrator and the stand-in for Proust himself. Since, as Proust told André Gide, all of his sexual experiences had been with men and none with women, he was obliged to transpose his homosexual experiences into heterosexual terms in order to flesh out those scenes, characters and situations. This transposition, I’d claim, was in fact the most creative part of his book, the very area where he had to combine memory of real experiences with objective observations of real women he’d studied in the world and their heterosexual male lovers. In his treatment of Albertine, the great love of Marcel’s life and the name that appears most frequently in the book, Proust drew on his affair with Agostinelli, his chauffeur, who met an early death during a flying lesson as a pilot, and with Henri Rochat, a handsome Swiss waiter at the Ritz who eventually moved in with Proust.

When I call these Proustian transpositions of men into women creative, I’m remembering my own experiences when I was in Ann Arbor as a student between 1958 and 1962. I belonged to the Sigma Nu fraternity but I was also cruising guys in the Union and less reputable places. One of my best friends was arrested for doing what I was constantly doing—and he had to report to a parole officer once a week for the next seven years. Not surprisingly, he became a prison psychologist not long afterwards.

In that period it was impossible to speak openly of one’s homosexual adventures. One had to translate them into heterosexual terms, and one had to have a detailed and capacious memory to keep track of all the lies one had invented, often on the spur of the moment. One also needed to be resourceful in finding plausible female activities (sewing, dancing) that would be a counterpart to the real-life male activities of one’s partners (sewing, cruising).

I feel that Proust’s elaborate transposition of male friends into female characters was an example of the same sort of obsessive and creative mendacity. The transpositions were precisely the most artistic part of Proust’s conception of his book, and to ignore them is to miss out on a true literary value peculiarly suited to be analyzed by a biographer.

Just to finish my little disquisition on homosexuality and biography, I’d say that gay lives are not like straight lives. One must know them intimately from the inside in order to place the right emphasis on the facts. For instance, those heterosexual biographers and critics who have attacked Michel Foucault for infecting people even after he knew he was positive for AIDS are ignoring several crucial things. First, Foucault was a sadomasochistic bottom, a slave, unlikely to have infected anyone, since a slave does not transmit his sperm. Second, Foucault certainly didn’t know he was positive, since there was no test to determine one’s HIV status in Europe until 1984, after Foucault’s death. Finally, since he was a friend of mine I can attest that he guessed at his diagnosis only five months before his death. He worried that he might have infected his lover, Daniel Defert, but he knew perfectly well that he’d never infected any of those leather guys in San Francisco. But of course my approach would not please the muckrakers. I’m afraid that all too often biography is the revenge of little people on big people.

Or take another issue, not at all technical or medical but just as telling. Those critics who attacked Brad Gooch’s City Poet, the biography of the New York poet of the ’50s, Frank O’Hara, complained that Gooch had talked too much about his sex life and not enough about the poetry. But in fact O’Hara, the founder of Personalism, wrote poems to his tricks and had such an active sex life, one might be tempted to say, in order to generate his poems, which are often dedicated to real tricks (who were all also his friends) or imaginary crushes. When Joan Accocela in the New Yorker complained that City Poet was too gossipy, she missed the point. O’Hara’s grinding social schedule and hundreds of sexual encounters offend people who want his life to be like a straight man’s of the same period. If O’Hara had had one or two gay marriages and had made his domestic life more important than his friendships, then he would have seemed like a reassuring translation of straight experience into gay terms. But O’Hara’s real life was messy and episodic in the retelling, even picaresque—it doesn’t add up to a simple, shapely narrative. It’s all day after day of drinks with X, dinner with Y and sex with Z—not what we expect in the usual literary biography. Biographies were originally meant to be exemplary lives, whether they were written as the Lives of the Saints or Plutarch’s Lives, whereas the lives of most gay men, especially those before gay liberation, were furtive, fragmented, submerged—half-erased tales that need special tools if they are to be rendered in glowing colors.

When I turned to The Farewell Symphony, the last volume of my autobiographical trilogy, I had just come out of the experience of researching and writing the Genet biography. I was now both a biographer and a novelist, I could tell myself. People often speak of fictional techniques—suspense, shapeliness, narrative flow—influencing the form of biographies, but in my case biographical techniques influenced my new understanding of the novel. Writing Genet’s life—which led from his childhood as a peasant